Making sense of business intelligence

Making sense of business intelligenceAs software technology used in commercial property management becomes more sophisticated, the term ‘business intelligence’ is becoming increasingly prevalent, says Kevin Yardi, director, Professional Services Group at Yardi Systems.Business intelligence, or BI, is the ability to use complex operating information so that executives and others can analyse asset performance and make effective decisions for their stakeholders. Centralised BI systems that automatically compile information from multiple sources in a single platform can deliver significant value by building powerful data visualisations, comparing actual versus forecasted budgets and streamlining decision-making through automation.Three elements of BI are involved in commercial real estate, says Kevin Yardi, director, Professional Services Group at Yardi Systems (pictured). One is descriptive analytics, which enables a real estate company to condense ‘big data’ into smaller and more useful nuggets of information.Another is predictive analytics, which is a more advanced version of descriptive analytics. It utilises a variety of statistical, modelling, data mining and machine learning techniques to study recent and historical data, thus empowering the BI system to make predictions about the future. The most complex and advanced form of BI is prescriptive analytics, a type of predictive analytics that can not only predict an outcome based on historical data but can also prescribe actions to achieve desired outcomes. Prescriptive analytics predicts multiple outcomes based on different decisions and conditions applied by the user and recommends a suitable course of action.”Once the different types of BI are understood, the next step is making all three forms usable by making them easily consumable and delivering them to end users,” says Yardi. “As business-wide management platforms have emerged, BI applications have become much more attainable across the marketplace because they don’t require the degree of custom design needed by aggregation systems.”Today’s BI systems are cloud-based, browser and device-agnostic systems, allowing end users to view data immediately via desktops or mobile devices. This enables executives to perform analysis from anywhere, resulting in faster responses that can make a company more competitive. A manager, for example, can utilise reports and dashboards in real time during meetings using their mobile devices. BI products also allow analysts to access and manipulate BI views via a spreadsheet file and create ad hoc analysis with which to potentially win a sale, report to the market or satisfy internal inquiries.Asset managers can use state-of-the-art BI systems to transform property management and accounting data housed in a technology platform into easy-to-use metrics that illustrate occupancy, lease expirations, net operating income, budgets versus actual, and dollars per square feet.”BI technology has advanced to the point that companies can even provide BI across a portfolio with the ability to drill down from the investor level to building tenants’ lease amendments and other property-level details,” Yardi says.”Technology advances, particularly in property management software and mobile applications, have brought this capability within reach of commercial real estate companies.”Read more